Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Kids Bring Box of Poop to American Museum of Natural History

Once a year, kids with bubble-wrapped bones and sandwich bags full of
nubby rocks crowd around precision-lit folding tables in the American
Museum of Natural History's Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall.

"We put this day on the calendar," said Caitlin Trasande, whose sons
Camilo, 6, and Ramiro, 5, had just learned that the rocks they collected
at Lake Taghkanic last summer contain 450-million-year-old marine
fossils. "We were waiting and waiting for this day to come." Camilo,
especially, couldn't believe it. "This was a flat snail that lived!" he
shrieked, jumping up and down. "A brachiopod is a filter-feeding animal
that usually lives in shells! You can see the imprint of the snail
itself!"

Nearby, Entomologist Lou Sorkin held a sealed pill bottle of living bed bugs
up to the light. A tiny camera projected the bugs onto a flat-screen
television behind him. Sorkin studies bed bug infestations within New
York apartment buildings, and he'll proudly show you the raw, red patch
of skin on back of his hand where he lets them feed. Yesterday, he
helped a nervous New Yorker identify a picture of a biting bug from her
apartment. It was a mite.

On Identification Day, museum-staff Anthropologists, Paleontologists,
Zoologists, and Ornithologists invite New Yorkers to bring in puzzling
shells, artifacts, rocks, and occasionally insects and feathers.
Equipped with magnifying glasses and comparison specimens from the
museum collection, they start by asking for context—where did this bone
come from? Did you find it on Rockaway Beach, or did you buy it on eBay?
Paleontologist Carl Mehling admits that, "More than fifty percent of
the time it's pure imagination. Someone will come in and say, 'This
looks like a dinosaur skull!' But it's just a rock. When I hear
something fantastic like that, I'm already concocting my gentle
letdown."

That was the case for Joey Rosado and his son Javier, who like to
visit Coney Island the day after a big storm, to collect bones and rocks
that get spit out onto the sand. Javier handed over two sharp bones
that he hoped came from a dinosaur. But Mehling quickly identified them
as "left-over barbecue," citing the clean-cut edges that could only come
from a bone saw.

There are exceptions, though. A few years ago, a woman showed Mehling
a skull that she had found on the beach in Virginia. "Immediately I
could see that it was part of a walrus skull. I knew that it couldn't be
modern, because walruses today are strictly arctic. The skull is
probably tens of millions of years old." And yesterday, even Mehling was
surprised when a shoebox full of fossilized dinosaur poop landed on his
table. Bridget, who lives in Manhattan, found the poop on a
construction site when she was traveling in Berkshire, England.

Poop is one of Mehling's specialities, and it's notoriously hard to
identify. "It's really, really hard to know what kind of animal
fossilized poop came from, because, unlike a body part, poop doesn't
have to look a certain way," he explained. "And when a creature poops,
it's not obligated to hang out and die right next to it."